# State Atheism Regimes (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) ## Intro In the twentieth century, for the first time in history, governments set out on purpose to remove God from entire nations. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Enver Hoxha's Albania did not simply happen to be run by unbelievers. They wrote atheism into their ideology, shut or destroyed churches, mosques and temples, imprisoned and killed clergy, and taught children that faith was a disease of the past. These same regimes were also among the deadliest in human history. Historians disagree on the exact numbers, and the ranges are wide, but the combined death toll of communist governments is usually estimated in the tens of millions, often given as somewhere around 70 to 100 million. Atheists often answer: "Stalin and Mao killed for communism, not for atheism. Nobody kills in the name of not believing in something." This page takes that objection seriously. The Christian answer is not that every atheist is dangerous. It is that these states were built on an ideology in which atheism was a core belief, not an accident; that they ran explicit programs against religion; and that by denying any God above the state they removed the deepest limit on what rulers may do to human beings. The detailed death-toll data live at [Atheist Regime Body Count](/codex/atheist-regime-body-count/). This page tells what each regime actually did to religion, and works through the cause-and-effect debate. ## In full **State atheism** is the official adoption of atheism by a government as part of its governing ideology, joined to the use of state power to suppress, restrict or eliminate religious belief and practice. In the twentieth century it was the policy of every Marxist-Leninist state to varying degrees, and reached its most extreme forms in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong (especially during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976), Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot (1975-1979), and Albania under Enver Hoxha, which in 1967 proclaimed itself the first atheist state in the world. The apologetic question is causal: did atheism contribute to these regimes' mass killing, or was it an incidental feature of regimes whose violence came from other sources (totalitarian power, utopian economics, personality cults, war)? The page argues a bounded thesis: atheism was not the sole cause, but in Marxist-Leninism it was constitutive rather than incidental, it was enforced by explicit anti-religious programs, and its denial of any transcendent moral authority removed a limit that would otherwise have stood against the state's treatment of persons. This is the distinction drawn at [Anti-Theism](/codex/anti-theism/): the relevant category is militant atheism as state ideology, not private unbelief. ## The ideological root All four regimes claimed descent from [Karl Marx](/codex/karl-marx/). Marx treated religion as the product of alienation and social misery, which he famously likened to an opiate of the people and which he thought would vanish once the conditions that produced it were abolished. Marx expected religion to wither on its own; it was Lenin who turned that expectation into a program of active struggle. Lenin's position, set out in his writings on socialism and religion from 1905 onward, was that while the state should declare religion a private matter, the revolutionary party could never be neutral toward it: the party was committed to dialectical materialism and therefore to the fight against religion. In his 1920 address to the Communist youth league, Lenin argued that communist morality is derived from and subordinated to the interests of the proletarian class struggle, and he explicitly rejected any morality grounded in the commands of God. Those two moves, militant atheism as party doctrine and morality redefined as whatever serves the revolution, passed into every regime that followed. ## The Soviet Union **Early measures (1917-1920s).** Within months of the October Revolution, the Bolshevik decree of January 1918 separated church from state and school from church, stripped religious bodies of legal personhood and nationalized church property. Clergy were classed among the *former people* and denied ordinary civil rights. During the famine of 1921-1922 the state used the seizure of church valuables as an occasion to try and execute clergy and faithful who resisted; Patriarch Tikhon was arrested. **The League of the Militant Godless.** Founded in 1925 as the League of the Godless and renamed the League of the Militant Godless in 1929, the organization was led by the party ideologist Yemelyan Yaroslavsky and published the periodical *Bezbozhnik* ("The Godless"). It ran anti-religious museums, lectures, mass rallies and school programs, and at its height claimed millions of members. Many former churches were converted into "museums of atheism," warehouses, clubs or prisons. **Stalin's campaign (1929-1939).** A 1929 law on religious associations confined worship to registered buildings and banned virtually all religious activity outside them, including religious education, charity and youth work. Church closures accelerated sharply through the 1930s. In 1931 the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was dynamited. During the Great Terror of 1937-1938, clergy of every confession were arrested and shot in large numbers; historians estimate that tens of thousands of Orthodox clergy, monks and nuns were killed in the interwar decades, alongside Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, rabbis and imams. By the end of the 1930s only a few hundred Orthodox churches remained open in a country that had had tens of thousands before the revolution, and most bishops were dead or imprisoned. **Wartime pause and renewed pressure.** In 1943, needing popular support against Germany, Stalin permitted the election of a patriarch and the reopening of some churches under tight state control. The concession was tactical, not a change of ideology. Under Khrushchev (roughly 1959-1964) a renewed campaign closed thousands of churches again, and religious believers remained barred from many careers until the late 1980s. **Death toll.** For the Soviet Union as a whole, estimates of deaths from executions, the Gulag, deportations and politically induced famines run from about 20 million (the figure associated with Robert Conquest and *The Black Book of Communism*) to considerably higher figures from R. J. Rummel. Estimates vary widely with method. ## Maoist China **Early control (1949-1965).** After the Communist victory in 1949, foreign missionaries were expelled, Christian schools and hospitals were taken over, and Protestant churches were brought under the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement (from 1954), with a parallel Catholic Patriotic Association (1957) that cut Chinese Catholics off from Rome. Pastors and priests who refused to join, such as Wang Mingdao and Bishop Ignatius Kung Pin-mei, spent decades in prison. **The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).** In August 1966 Mao's Red Guards launched the campaign against the **Four Olds**: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. Religion was a principal target. Churches, temples, mosques and monasteries were closed, looted, demolished or turned to secular use; Bibles and scriptures were burned; clergy and believers were paraded, beaten, imprisoned or killed in "struggle sessions." For roughly a decade there was effectively no legal public worship anywhere in China. In Tibet, the destruction of monasteries, already severe after 1959, reached its height. **Death toll.** Most of the deaths under Mao came not from the anti-religious campaign as such but from the Great Leap Forward famine (1959-1961), with mainstream estimates around 30 to 45 million (Frank Dikötter's figure is about 45 million), and from political campaigns and purges. Total estimates for the Mao era commonly fall between roughly 40 and 70 million, with Rummel and others higher. Estimates vary. **The aftermath.** When churches were allowed to reopen after 1979, believers emerged in far greater numbers than before the persecution. Christianity in China grew dramatically in the following decades, much of it in unregistered house churches; see [Pentecostalization of Global Christianity](/codex/pentecostalization-of-global-christianity/). ## Khmer Rouge Cambodia **Year Zero.** When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, they emptied the cities, abolished money, markets and schools, and declared a new beginning, often called Year Zero. Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), who had encountered Marxism as a student in Paris, led Democratic Kampuchea until the Vietnamese invasion of January 1979. **Religion abolished in practice.** Theravada Buddhism, the religion of the great majority of Cambodians and formerly the state religion, was dismantled: monks were defrocked, forced into labor, or killed, and pagodas were destroyed or used as prisons, storehouses and execution sites. The Cham Muslim minority was targeted with particular ferocity. Christians, a small minority, were treated as agents of foreign influence, and the Catholic cathedral of Phnom Penh was torn down stone by stone. Though the regime's 1976 constitution nominally mentioned freedom of belief, in practice all religious life was suppressed. **Death toll.** Estimates commonly cited, including those of historian Ben Kiernan and the Cambodian Genocide Program, are around 1.5 to 2 million deaths in under four years, roughly a fifth to a quarter of the population. Estimates vary. ## Albania: the first atheist state **Enver Hoxha** ruled Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985. Religious persecution began soon after the communist takeover: Catholic clergy in particular were imprisoned and executed in the late 1940s, and the Orthodox and Muslim communities were brought under state control. In 1967, inspired by China's Cultural Revolution, Hoxha launched a campaign in which young activists closed every church and mosque in the country, more than two thousand buildings, many of which were demolished or turned into warehouses, cinemas and gymnasiums. Albania then proclaimed itself the first atheist state in the world. The 1976 constitution wrote state atheism into fundamental law and banned religious organizations. Baptizing a child or possessing religious literature could bring imprisonment, and clergy who continued ministry in secret were imprisoned or executed. Religious practice was legalized again only in 1990, as the regime collapsed. Albania's experience is a clean test case: a small country in which the state attempted total elimination of religion for over two decades and failed to eliminate it. ## The debate: did atheism cause it? ### The objection stated fairly The standard reply runs in several forms: 1. **"They killed for communism, not atheism."** The motive was class war, collectivization, national power and paranoia. Atheism was a side feature. 2. **"Atheism is just a lack of belief."** A lack of belief cannot motivate anything. Nobody, the argument goes, ever killed in the name of atheism; Richard Dawkins pressed this point in *The God Delusion* (2006). 3. **"These regimes were themselves religions."** Communism had dogmas, prophets, scriptures and saints; it was a political religion, so its crimes count against dogmatism generally, not against atheism. Sam Harris makes a version of this argument. 4. **"Correlation is not causation."** Many states have been atheist without mass killing, and religious states have also killed. Some of this deserves concession. Atheism by itself does not produce a political program; individual atheists are no more prone to murder than anyone else; and economic ideology, totalitarian structure and individual tyrants carry enormous responsibility. Christians who flatten the argument into "atheists are murderers" are wrong and are easily refuted. ### The response 1. **Atheism was ideological, not incidental.** In Marxist-Leninism atheism was not an unrelated private opinion of the leaders; it was a doctrine of the official worldview (dialectical materialism) and a duty of party membership, from Lenin onward. A system whose founding texts call for the overcoming of religion cannot treat its anti-religious policies as accidents. 2. **The anti-religious programs were explicit.** The League of the Militant Godless, the 1929 Soviet law on religious associations, the Four Olds campaign, the Khmer Rouge's destruction of the Buddhist sangha and Albania's 1967 closure of every place of worship were deliberate state policies aimed at belief in God as such. Believers were imprisoned and killed because they were believers. That is persecution in the name of an atheist program, which answers the claim that no one has ever acted in atheism's name. 3. **The removal of transcendent moral limits.** The deepest point is not motive but restraint. If there is no God, there is no authority above the state to which rulers answer, no judgment after death ([Hebrews 9:27](/codex/hebrews-9-27/)), and no image of God in each person that the state must respect ([Genesis 1:27](/codex/genesis-1-27/); see [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/)). Lenin's explicit subordination of morality to class struggle is exactly this move: morality becomes whatever serves the revolution, and persons become material for history. Once that is accepted, there is nothing in principle that forbids killing a class of people if the plan requires it. Christianity does not prevent all evil, but it supplies a standard by which the state itself stands condemned when it does evil. See [Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure](/codex/atheism-moral-neutrality-failure/) and [Stealing from God Argument](/codex/stealing-from-god-argument/). 4. **The "political religion" reply concedes the point.** If removing God led these societies to build substitute objects of worship (the party, history, the leader), then the experiment shows that abandoning theism does not produce a rational, peaceful humanism. It produces an idolatry with no transcendent check. The Psalmist describes the posture exactly: rulers who say "Let us break their bonds asunder, And cast away their cords from us" ([Psalm 2:3](/codex/psalms-2/), ASV). 5. **Symmetry.** Those who say religious wars show that religion causes violence cannot then insist that militant-atheist persecutions show nothing about atheism. If ideology matters in one case, it matters in the other. William Cavanaugh's critique of the "religious violence" category makes a related point from the other side; see [William Cavanaugh](/codex/william-cavanaugh/) and [Religion Causes Violence Objection Defeater](/codex/religion-causes-violence-objection-defeater/). ### A bounded conclusion The argument does not need atheism to be the only cause, and it does not claim that every atheist is a Stalin. It claims three things the record supports: (1) the regimes that made atheism state doctrine persecuted religion deliberately and on a vast scale; (2) these same regimes produced the largest peacetime mass killings of the modern era; and (3) the confident claim that removing God makes societies more humane has been tested at national scale, more than once, and failed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived the Gulag, summed up the lesson in his 1983 Templeton address, recalling the elders of his childhood who explained Russia's disasters by saying that men had forgotten God. ## Scripture - **The fool's creed and its fruit.** "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works" ([Psalm 14:1](/codex/psalms-14-1/), ASV). The psalm ties practical godlessness to moral corruption, not as automatic cause but as the soil in which corruption grows. - **The rulers against the Lord.** "The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against Jehovah, and against his anointed" ([Psalm 2:2](/codex/psalms-2/), ASV). The same psalm ends with God laughing at the attempt. - **Given over.** "Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting" ([Romans 1:28](/codex/romans-1-28/), ASV). - **The church survives.** Jesus promised, "upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" ([Matthew 16:18](/codex/matthew-16-18/), ASV). The Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge and Hoxha's Albania are gone, while the churches they tried to destroy remain, and the church in China is far larger than it was under Mao. ## See also - [Atheist Regime Body Count](/codex/atheist-regime-body-count/), the detailed death-toll data and source table - [Anti-Theism](/codex/anti-theism/), the distinction between private atheism and anti-theism as state ideology - [Karl Marx](/codex/karl-marx/), the ideological source of all four regimes - [Religion Causes Violence Objection Defeater](/codex/religion-causes-violence-objection-defeater/), the full debate-prep defeater this page supports - [Religion Causes Violence Objection](/codex/religion-causes-violence-objection/), the objection hub - [Religion and Violence](/codex/religion-and-violence/), the broader historical comparison - [Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure](/codex/atheism-moral-neutrality-failure/), why atheism provides no moral brake - [Stealing from God Argument](/codex/stealing-from-god-argument/), borrowed moral capital in atheist ethics - [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/), the doctrine of human dignity these regimes denied - [William Cavanaugh](/codex/william-cavanaugh/), critique of the "religious violence" category - [New Atheism](/codex/new-atheism/), the movement whose "religion poisons everything" thesis this record answers - [Pentecostalization of Global Christianity](/codex/pentecostalization-of-global-christianity/), the global church growth that followed, including in post-Mao China ## Further reading - Stéphane Courtois et al., *The Black Book of Communism* (French 1997; English 1999) - R. J. Rummel, *Death by Government* (1994); *Lethal Politics* (1990); *China's Bloody Century* (1991) - Robert Conquest, *The Great Terror* (1968; revised 1990) - Daniel Peris, *Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless* (1998) - Frank Dikötter, *Mao's Great Famine* (2010); *The Cultural Revolution: A People's History* (2016) - Ben Kiernan, *The Pol Pot Regime* (1996) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, *The Gulag Archipelago* (1973-1975)
## Common questions this page answers **Q: Which countries were officially atheist states?** The main twentieth-century cases were the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China (especially under Mao), Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge, Albania under Enver Hoxha, and North Korea, along with the Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe to varying degrees. Albania went furthest on paper, declaring itself the first atheist state in the world in 1967 and banning all religion. **Q: Did Stalin and Mao kill people because of atheism?** Not because of atheism alone. Their killing had many causes, including utopian economics, totalitarian power and personal paranoia. But atheism was a core doctrine of their Marxist-Leninist ideology, they ran explicit campaigns against religion, and their denial of any God above the state removed the deepest moral limit on what the state could do to people. The bounded claim is that atheism was a contributing, constitutive factor, not an accident. **Q: Isn't it true that nobody ever killed in the name of atheism?** No. The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, Stalin's anti-religious campaigns, China's Four Olds campaign, the Khmer Rouge's destruction of Buddhism and Albania's closure of every church and mosque were state programs aimed at eliminating belief in God. Clergy and believers were imprisoned and killed because of their faith under those programs. **Q: What was the League of the Militant Godless?** A Soviet mass organization founded in 1925 as the League of the Godless and renamed in 1929, led by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky. It ran anti-religious propaganda, museums, lectures and school programs, published the periodical *Bezbozhnik*, and worked alongside the state's closure of churches and persecution of clergy. **Q: What was the "Four Olds" campaign?** A campaign launched by Mao's Red Guards in August 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution against old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. Religion was a main target: churches, temples, mosques and monasteries were closed or destroyed, scriptures burned and clergy beaten, imprisoned or killed. For about a decade China had effectively no legal public worship. **Q: How many people died under communist regimes?** Estimates vary widely by method and source. *The Black Book of Communism* gave a figure on the order of 100 million for communist regimes worldwide; R. J. Rummel's estimates are higher; other historians give lower figures. See [Atheist Regime Body Count](/codex/atheist-regime-body-count/) for the ranges by country. **Q: Weren't these regimes really a kind of religion themselves?** They borrowed religious forms: sacred texts, infallible leaders, rituals, and hopes of a coming paradise. But that concedes the Christian point rather than refuting it. Removing God did not produce a rational, peaceful humanism; it produced a substitute worship of party and leader with no transcendent judge above it.